Unusual Hollywood movie.

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2007)

The Longest Day is a long movie that tries to dramatize the events of June 6, 1944 - D-Day - and succeeds!!!! Here Hollywood actually succeeds in making a movie that stars ... the actual historical event. This is so uncharacteristic of Hollywood that it deserves special notice. Usually when Hollywood gets a hold of some historical event that it wants to bring to the screen, the event itself winds up becoming a mere backdrop to some insipid love story. This movie does not ... REPEAT ... DOES NOT ... do that. How the producers of this movie managed to stay so focused should itself be the subject of a movie. Nowadays if Hollywood did a remake of this movie, maybe one-quarter of the movie would be about the actual event and the remainder be about some dumb and completely impossible love story - for instance an American paratrooper who, of course, had never been away from his hometown until joining the army, and a young French women, who happens to be fluent in English (with a French accent of course), who are both hiding from the Germans while the invasion is going on ... and become guerrilla fighters and then ... lovers!!! (In reality, the French woman would have been a collaborator who would have reported the GI to the German authorities or her SS lover. After all, let's not forget Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval.) That's what Hollywood would do The Longest Day if re-made today. One other thing, it is tempting to compare this movie to Saving Private Ryan. This is like comparing apples with oranges. They're both war movies concerning D-Day, and that's where the comparison ends. What is for certain is that D-Day, June 6, 1944, was one of those momentous days in history that no amount of Hollywood embellishment can trump and that the brave soldiers who stormed onto Omaha Beach were the stars of the story and to portray it any differently would not only be artistically dishonest but disrespectful to the memory of those brave soldiers who participated in the event and in many cases made the supreme sacrifice.